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Chapter 3 suggests the mobility of the documentary idea by looking at movements conventionally viewed in opposition to each other: documentary and the avant-garde. Avant-garde cinema has been associated with aesthetic innovation, imagination, and playfulness, while documentary has been seen as a ‘sober’ discursive mode. This chapter works to excavate significant intersections between the two, finally considering how the modernist aesthetics of documentaries such as Manhatta helped to vivify a widely adhered to notion of American individuality and newness: a progressive, unabashedly urban...

Chapter 3 suggests the mobility of the documentary idea by looking at movements conventionally viewed in opposition to each other: documentary and the avant-garde. Avant-garde cinema has been associated with aesthetic innovation, imagination, and playfulness, while documentary has been seen as a ‘sober’ discursive mode. This chapter works to excavate significant intersections between the two, finally considering how the modernist aesthetics of documentaries such as Manhatta helped to vivify a widely adhered to notion of American individuality and newness: a progressive, unabashedly urban vision of the nation, tinged with a cautious nostalgia for a pre-industrial past.